Lost Creek Hollow [m] psalms 91:10

she is not that little girl anymore.
as crimson blooms along his neck and her chin and dribbles onto the ground, she thinks back to when he had hit her for the first time. she and iris had been playing outside after a storm, and she remembers staring at the two sets of little brown prints and hearing her sister wail in horror as the strike bounces off of her face.
she thinks back to the first time he had touched her, that night she pretended to be asleep and how she had prayed for it to be over. it had to have been an accident, she’d told herself, until it happened again. and again, and again; and how her mother had turned an eye, and how she sometimes heard the same cries of pain from her sister’s den.
she thinks of the first time he drew blood.
the first time he hit her mother in front of her.
the second times, the thirds, fourths, fifths, tenths, fiftieths, hundredths;
and she thinks of the i’m sorry’s, the little gifts he’d leave at the denmouth, the stories and lies and excuses;
and when she first saw him, looked into those gunsmoke eyes, she was still that frightened little girl for a hazy moment;
but not now, not anymore, not ever again.
she is crying as she tears into him, kicks, yells; rabid, feral, feverish; she is not a victim, but a survivor. a wife, a mother, a warrior, a leader. a person.
she only wishes she had the strength to kill him.
she sends him away from her border a beaten mass of scarlet and soot, and she is trembling, sobbing; when she can no longer see him, she turns to hurl this evening’s dinner upon the tainted earth;
and she resolves, then and there, that she will take her wife and children and they will go somewhere they will never be found by him again.